fishtwanger
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User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
17d ago
You seem to be reacting very strongly to something, and I'm not entirely sure what, but we might be closer than you think.
By "nature documentary", I mean that although we happen to be following one little fellow around with our camera, and building audience identification with him, the choice of subject is either largely arbitrary, or selected after-the-fact when we know who gets a result we're interested in. But there's many of these potential subjects operating at any given time, with various degrees of success. If we only follow the stories of young stags who win the mating contest, or successful leaders of movements, or successful startup founders, we don't get a complete picture of the lifecycle, and can fool ourselves into mis-attributing the amounts of ability, tenacity, opportunism, and luck that are required for success. And to the degree that the OP's goal is building a theory of what happens, I think it's important to look at all the angles.
But for people who grew up under 90's liberalism, that sounds like the choices to follow particular "entrepreneurs" are freely made, and if this is what you assert, I'm prepared to push back with examples from both the market, nature, politics, and social movements.
On the one hand, at the level of the individual, of course there's free choice going on. But on the other hand, from the perspective of the potential organizer, it's all statistics, at least after the first few dozen people, and setting aside "whales" or important benefactors. It's treating the people as just another natural resource lying around, under-exploited, like an oilfield or an ocean or a bunch of horny dudes. Individual horny dudes obviously make choices about whether and where to spend money on naked Internet girls, but to the naked Internet girls they're a non-uniform resource which gets exploited as appropriate. (Attention being roughly proportional to revenue, as I understand the market dynamics?)
I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together.
That's no really new, it's a message that all democratic countries bombard their citizens with.
I think this is the core of the misunderstanding? I can see how that looks a lot more naive and idealistic than I meant, and it looks like the mention of Lenin failed to set the tone. A herd of wild cattle is a powerful force, but if you can manage to round them up and brand them, they're all going to be eaten (or otherwise exploited).
To rephrase a bit, I think that when there are a mass of people desiring a particular type of change, that presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to recognize and exploit this unfulfilled desire. It's not always the first who succeed; sometimes later ones will do it better. And the nature of the desire is important, in that the presented "solution" needs to cater to it. I suspect that people who come up with an ideology and then look for converts, are going to be less successful than people who find a group of potential converts and then come up with an ideology that makes them want to join (Hitler's path, IMO, although he was a part of the group himself), or people who just start improvising and don't care what they say as long as it gets crowds to cheer their name (Trump's path, IMO). Marxism is something of an exceptional case, but I think this model can cover it.
I haven't read Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", but from what I've seen, it describes that middle approach (the Hitler one). Sure, it talks about doing everything to help "the poor", but ultimately it's about constructing an organization with yourself as a leader, and acquiring power, and the choice of ideology is completely irrelevant. The organizer may even think that they're doing it for the benefit of the people (and it's probably more effective if they do believe this, on some level), but it still boils down to "find an untapped source of power, and build an engine that exploits it", in the sense of a deck-builder card game. On the one hand, I do care about having good cards, but on the other hand, they're just pieces of cardboard that help me win the game. Maybe the solution I propose is "equal pay for equal work", or maybe it's "gas the Jews", whatever gets my power-base motivated. If the leader is just out for power, from a certain perspective there isn't a difference.
Is that sufficiently cynical? :-)
fishtwanger
17d ago
Stage 1 and 2 seem to imply that all movements start with elites, who are not themselves a natural client. I'd prefer a more market-style reading, where the niche exists first, and may be filled with a variety of solutions. But as in a nature documentary, we choose to follow a particular entrepreneur who comes up with an idea that allow them to make money/gain power in the niche. They may not be the only one exploiting the niche, so there may be competition. And they may have found the niche by being part of it themselves, as in Paul Graham's advice to build something you want to use. And there were entrepreneurs before them, and there will be some after them too.
I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together. And as Lenin discovered, an ideological vanguard is a great way to do it. And if you want the movement to persist, the mass of people should never actually be satisfied, which was one of those criticisms of consumer capitalism that can easily be repurposed to describe the slippery slope of activism.
fishtwanger
19d ago
This is like a guy who has an old car that barely works, and every time it breaks down he patches it up just enough to keep running again. He doesn't have some hidden Freudian motive about "preferring to not have a reliable car", he'd actually like to have a reliable car, but he can't think beyond the immediate moment. If the car is capable of moving, he gets distracted by Twitter or rebuilding his computer or trying to get a complete set of Michael Whelan covers of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories, or whatever. Only when smoke actually starts coming out of the hood, or the clicking noise gets too annoying, will he spend a bit of time to tinker with it.
fishtwanger
19d ago
(At the very least, once my Mom passes…)
Yeah, same here, and I'm not quite sure how my decision process will go after that. But I do have some nephews and nieces, and some little first cousins once removed, and maybe they'll keep me going.
There's an old children's book of Greek mythology I had when I was a kid, "The Greek Gods", by Evslin, Evslin, and Hoopes. It's got the story of the twins, Apollo and Artemis, and part of the story is that Artemis gets to choose her own gifts. Among her requests is "I wish to be your maiden always, never a woman." And Zeus' response is "You shall have the gift of eternal chastity, and also the gift of changing your mind about it at any time, which will help you not want to." I feel the same way about suicide.
There's another part of my situation which makes the choice a bit easier. I shouldn't go into detail, but I'll just say that sufficiently strong anger appears to be able to overwhelm any other emotion I can feel, including despair. I don't know whether this is actually a good thing, but in the spirit of honesty, I thought I'd share.
Did you ever watch "The Wire"? Nope.
Well, personally, I consider it the best TV show ever made. Opinions differ, but I'd say it's definitely worth trying out a few episodes.
Yeah, I don't really have those — not nearly enough to "fill the days."
Hm. I suppose one thing I have going for me is that I got into Buddhism enough to be able to "live in the moment", most of the time. Even just eating plain rice, if I pay attention and go slow, I can actively enjoy it, the flavor and texture and the entire process of the thing. I don't actually know whether this is good for my long-term mental health - I think there might be ways in which this partial half-assed approach has crippled my internal mechanisms that could lead to recovery - but it does work on a moment-to-moment basis. You could try taking a look at "The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts, if you want an overview. It's short and a good read, anyway.
fishtwanger
20d ago
Given that it's listed as being from Australian English, I might have spelt it the same way. It wouldn't seem much different than what they do with their vowels in other places. ;-)
It's a nifty word, thanks for sharing!
fishtwanger
20d ago
One trick that occasionally works for me is to think of today-me and tomorrow-me as separate people, close as twin siblings, and to try to have today-me do favors for tomorrow-me.
For weight gain specifically, you might try fasting. In my experience, the first two days are the hardest, after that it gets much easier (when ketosis kicks in). It helps if you learn to appreciate unflavored tea. (A major contraindication is if you're on medication that needs to be taken with food.) And in my opinion, exercise is fun when I'm in shape, and miserable when I'm not, and I think a lot of people get the correlation/causation thing wrong there.
As for whether to go on living... I don't particularly, either. It's more of a habit; I can get some enjoyment out of daily life, and occasionally there are specific things I look forward to. True, it would be very convenient to die in my sleep, and I've gone to bed plenty of times hoping that would happen. But ultimately, there are some people out there whom I love, who love me, and as long as they're alive and in touch with me, I don't want to hurt them. (Did you ever watch "The Wire"? The end of season 2? I don't want to do that to them.) In the meantime, I try to find little pleasures in life, like smelling flowers, petting kitties, taking hot showers, and so on. It doesn't help with motivation toward long-term goals, but it fills the days. I wish I could help more.
fishtwanger
20d ago
Write him off. He's toxic-to-dangerous to associate with. You may have had a long friendship with him, but that was only because he hid his full personality from you. It's the classic story of any abusive relationship, whether it be controlling spouses, pimps, or vampires. Find people in the group that you can trust, and talk about everything (it sounds like you're doing this). Share all the warning signs, and listen when other people share theirs. Look up diagnostic criteria and discuss them like a book club.
As for the bad actor, you want to separate from him in a way that does not draw attention to you personally. If he focuses on you, that could be dangerous: you don't know what he might try. Just fade out and wind down any connections. Be a "gray rock", stay bland, don't give any emotion back one way or another, and be noncommittal. From a purely selfish perspective, let other people take the heat. But if you're feeling altruistic, you can look up strategies like this and share them with other people in the group.
Sadly, I don't think modern society has any good legal/ethical remedy for this situation. (If only we still had weregild!). He'll be out there, preying on other people, and you'll know that. Fortunately, this guy doesn't seem particularly intelligent, charismatic, or sadistic, so you're probably not letting another Jeffrey Dahmer go free. Unless he escalates, he'll just be spreading a low-grade cloud of misery and evil into the world.
fishtwanger
20d ago
Reading while stretching is fun, especially gravity-assisted stretches where no muscle activation is needed.
fishtwanger
21d ago
Thowaway lines are one thing, but for anything with a plot, I think it does more harm than good.
fishtwanger
21d ago
In some ways, it seems like a game, or most other types of job. It's an artificial toy system, but as long as it's kept contained, there's nothing horribly unusual about molding a bit of your brain into a shape that reacts to the output of the system. (Whether doing so is "good" is a different question, but it often seems to be necessary for modern life.) But yeah, there's a huge problem when you start altering your basic personality and political views based on artificial outputs, especially if you're not aware that that's what you're doing.
fishtwanger
21d ago
spruke
Is that a version of this word? I never encountered either before, but the context seems right...
fishtwanger
21d ago
Depends on the type of game, but largely agreed.
Also, voice acting is a mistake. Too many resources get locked up in creating art that only applies to one or few paths. The result winds up being either a bad movie that stops every so often so you can press buttons or play a minigame, or a game that cripples itself to cater to the needs of the bad movie that's been grafted onto it like a second head.
fishtwanger
21d ago
I've seen the first episode, and am unsure whether to keep watching. (I've read the book and seen the 1980 miniseries, a few times each, and like them both, and am not worried about spoilers at all.)
It felt a lot like a certain failure mode often associated with Internet fan-fiction, where the author fell in love with so many of the side-characters that they wind up killing the pacing and narrative structure by ballooning out character "development" with empty scenes that could have better been collapsed into a throwaway reference or a single glance. (GRRM was very good at managing this in ASoIaF, at first. But after book 4 or so, it got beyond his ability to control.)
Despite the claims that various people involved never watched the 1980 miniseries, it was interesting to see how many casting and costuming choices mirrored it and played with it. I especially liked the new interpretation of Rodrigues; he seemed like someone who hadn't exactly gone native, but had adopted a pick-and-choose attitude toward philosophies of life, making him no longer fish nor fowl. And I pity the actor who has to follow in Toshiro Mifune's shoes, but he seemed to be doing a good job. I did not like Yabushige's characterization, but that's on the writers, not the actor. (And why did they alter the name? I searched for a while but found nothing.) I didn't like the actor for Blackthorne - partly because he looks so... early 21st century North American action movie - but maybe he'll grow on me.
Putting aside the annoyance I have at the various interviews that criticize the originals for culture war reasons, I did think there was a lot of promise in the idea of presenting the story from the Japanese viewpoint. The early part where the ship showed up out of the fog was spooky, and the samurai boarding it reminded me of space marines boarding a derelict hulk. But I think to do that properly, they'd need to view Blackthorne as something like a space alien, and the series overall as a "second contact" story with a new alien species that tells you that the "benevolent federation" that you've joined isn't quite so benevolent after all. But instead, they give us enough of his POV that this doesn't work, but not enough of his POV to really get into his head. They left out some bits that provide motivation for his actions, and sped through bits where he should have been working on communication difficulties.
fishtwanger
21d ago
specifically targeted by social media companies
If you look at this in relationship terms, this is gaslighting and abuse. Entity A is trying to act according to entity B's rules, but B is deliberately altering natural feedback in order to keep entity A isolated and weak. All A sees is that they try things that should work, but there's no sign of those things working, and so their model of the world gradually disconnects from reality.
divorce is a social contagion of sorts
I didn't see a link to the paper, but the article gave no indication that there was a reason to suppose a causal link. It seems entirely plausible that there's a hidden 3rd factor that contributes to divorce rates in both the subject, and in the subject's social circle. It seems like a lot of "post hoc ergo propter hoc". (And you identify a potential mechanism and cause for a 3rd factor later!)
Could Silicon Valley, not unlike how they targeted Crowder's business through the algorithm, having also targeted his marriage?
I doubt very much that it's deliberate. Bullies don't usually set out to cause the exact set of symptoms that their victims develop. Perhaps there were people who were deliberately pushing this guy's buttons to see what kind of damage they could do, but even if someone takes credit for intentionally causing the result, I suspect that it'd just be narcissistic post facto justfication at work. ("Yes, of course I planned that, aren't I smart?")
fishtwanger
21d ago
On the contrary, it might sometimes be the case that society will follow the rule more if I (1) break the rule, (2) keep it secret that I broke the rule, and (3) use my ill-gotten gains from breaking the rule to promulgate the rule.
I don't think it could never happen, but I think it doesn't happen very often, and has a chance of severely backfiring. SBF comes to mind. I think it much more likely that someone who breaks the rule and keeps it secret, will be less likely to follow through on promulgation, and more likely to continue to break rules and keep them secret. I think that anyone who actually cares about promulgating the rule shouldn't use high-variance strategies that risk destroying everything they worked for.
Or do you claim that secretly breaking a rule for the purpose of strengthening the rule is moral if the rule is a good one?
I think that's classic self-delusion, and while it might happen to lead to a correct conclusion in some instances, the chain of thought that leads to it is corrupt.
Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it?
Not solely because, but yes, among other things it contributes to the collapse of civil society, especially if it's never punished.
Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
Not very much, but it's better than not hiding the theft, and better than using the proceeds from the theft to do more evil. Do you disagree?
I believe that B and C have done more damage to the moral prohibition against stealing than A has.
Partly this depends on whether A ever gets caught. (SBF, again.)
If so, should the actions of B and C be illegal, and punishable by prison terms longer than what A would serve if he had gotten caught stealing the horse?
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of an organization that advocates for the violent overthrow of the government of the United States of America?
I don't think we humans have a good track record at using laws to propagate virtue. Especially when it comes to people acting in good faith who we think happen to be wrong. Are you suggesting that everything bad should be illegal, and that the law should be a perfect mapping of all possible actions to their ethical value and from there to the punishment or reward that is appropriate? (Should I report your comment for advocating for a system under which the comment itself might be bannable?)
All I recall advocating for was integrity and a bit of forethought. The alternatives, while not uniformly worse, seem quite lopsidedly worse. Hopefully we (humans) are in this (civilization) for the long haul.
fishtwanger
21d ago
I think I got it from "The Modern Mind" by Peter Watson, an "intellectual history of the 20th century":
fishtwanger
21d ago
I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I think the appeal is that both of them describe how people are shaped by their environment, thus implying that intelligent control of the environment could allow shaping of people, which is an incredibly seductive idea even if most people won't admit it. The contradiction is that Freud says that people are shaped by their families and social circles, and Marx says that people are shaped by their socio-economic class and the economic structure of society.
fishtwanger
21d ago
One of these is not like the others.
There can be some incredible body odor from people who don't shower and have been living outside for days or weeks, and putting who-knows-what into their body. I can smell it upon entering the public library near me. (Public libraries are another casualty of homelessness - they're good places to sleep during the day, dry and warm and quiet and reasonably safe.)
fishtwanger
21d ago
what is the right place to go to be a bum?
I would have said at the church serving free all-you-can-eat warm meals every weekday, when they're serving, but it doesn't make a dent in the people panhandling outside the grocery store half a block away. I asked, and one woman thought for a moment and said that she'd lose her spot if she went to get the free food.
Outside of the park, you can't just go and "hang out" because it's all owned by someone who will kick you out for loitering
The trick is to find corporate-owned commercial properties, preferably part of a nation-wide chain. They don't want bad publicity, their standardized policies don't let them adapt to local conditions quickly, and the employees aren't motivated to do anything because they get paid regardless (until the entire store shuts down).
I kind of think what we need is to normalize favela's/shantytowns.
Seattle tried that. People got killed and raped. And the ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that everything bad will get posted to the Internet, and the city will be blamed for allowing it to happen.
fishtwanger
22d ago
Maybe I'll post about this sometime, but for now, in short: I don't think the problem is related to intelligence. "Willpower" is closer, but that's a folk egregore. "Short time horizons" is better, but I think that's one of the symptoms, not the root cause. If I had to put a name on it, I'd call it "despair", as in the opposite of "hope".
There's no hope. It hurts to think about the future. At night, dreams are only about the past, or fiction, or fantastic scenarios like winning the lottery or gaining magic powers, never about what might actually happen next in day to day life. Money gets spent fast, because it's ridiculous to think of it making a difference in the future. The hole is so deep that any realistic amount of money won't help dig you out. If you pay the credit card off, it'll just be cancelled, but as long as they think they can get money from you, they'll still let you use it. The choice between eating out and eating in is simple: you can do it, it will make you feel better than otherwise, it won't make your situation significantly worse, and there's no meaningful evidence that systematic deprivation will lead to long-term benefits. Life will still be shit tomorrow, but at least you'll have a few hours of happiness today. And as shocking as it may seem, all of this is compatible with scoring highly on IQ tests.
And then, over the years, it becomes habit.
And that's when lack of self-awareness, which might be correlated with low intelligence, can cause people to lock it in. To believe that there is no other way, that they can't help themselves, that it's not their fault, that they're fine and the rest of world is to blame. And it's not like there's much evidence against that hypothesis. And from there, it's just a short step to thinking that it's people Not Like You that are doing this to you and everyone else you know: the Other, the Man, whites, blacks, Jews, men, women, liberals, conservatives, whoever. Them.
fishtwanger
22d ago
Isn't it less about representing a recognized state, and more about wearing uniforms and obeying an authority that can order a surrender? There were Confederate partisans, but the Confederate armies wore uniforms and surrendered when ordered. Pirates do neither. Hamas doesn't wear uniforms, and I doubt that most of them would surrender if their leadership in Qatar suddenly said "it's over now, we've lost the war: Israel is too powerful, and we don't want innocent Gazans to suffer any more".
fishtwanger
22d ago
This doesn't address the main thrust of your argument, which (to try to sum it up in less than one sentence) I think is about how proximity correlates to care, and what that says about universalist ethics, but...
Perhaps there is some deep metaphysical argument that establishes, on an objective basis, that one ought to behave the way they wish others in "their community" to behave
If you want society to follow a rule, hold to that rule and propagate that rule. If you hold to it but don't propagate it, it won't last. And if you propagate it but don't hold to it, people will eventually Notice.
Doesn't really matter what the rule is. Utilitarianism, Christianity, Nazism, whatever. And clearly other factors can be involved (like losing WWII).
Of course, if one were merely aiming for a short-term effect, like personal benefit, that doesn't apply. One might be able to fool enough of the people, enough of the time, to get away with whatever one wants.
fishtwanger
22d ago
This is a great way to get on the bad side of judges. They are not amused by people trying to game the system.
fishtwanger
22d ago
one of the purposes of Oct 7 was to disrupt the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that Netanyahu was nearly achieving despite the dogma
Yeah, it seemed like the Palestinians were gradually being discarded by the governments of Arab/Muslim states (except perhaps Iran), even if the general population still cared. It reminds me of the way the Chinese government cracks down on nationalist revanchism every so often: partly it's that they don't actually want to invade Taiwan/wherever at this particular moment, but also it feels like they're setting things up so that they get to play "good cop" in international relations ("if you don't work with us, we might lose some domestic legitimacy, and then we'd have to appease those people").
Thanks for providing an infodump. I'm somewhat new here, and I confess that I don't know your position on this whole mess, but you seem like a calm and reasonable person. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions on sensitive topics, in case you still feel like answering. If you don't want to, I completely understand.
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I've seen a few videos that appear to be of harmless Gazans being shot dead. I don't think they're fakes. What's up with that? And why aren't they viewed as more of a Abu-Ghraib-level scandal by Israelis and supporters of Israel? I worry that Israeli society has fallen to the level that American society did shortly after Sep 11, where pretty much anything could be justified, and almost no one was willing to dissent. And that parts of the IDF are taking out their anger and frustration in ways that are more about personal vengeance than about any strategic purpose. Here's the two worst ones that I've seen; they're old but they've stuck in my mind. I haven't had the heart to look for more recent ones, and none have been forced into my attention, but I don't know whether that's because they stopped happening, or whether they're just better hidden. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-slams-uk-network-after-claim-unarmed-gazan-was-shot-dead-shortly-after-interview/ https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/26/middleeast/hala-khreis-white-flag-shooting-gaza-cmd-intl/index.html
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It seems that factions in Israel supported the initial incarnation of Hamas, decades ago, in order to destabilize the PLO/Fatah. What's your take on that? To me, it seems like either a short-sighted plan that backfired (much like assassinating heads of state, in hopes that whatever replaces them is more controllable), or an extremely cynical ploy to eliminate compromise in favor of the preferred extreme solution. (None of which should be read as relieving Gazans of their ethical responsibility for their own actions.)
Thanks again, in advance, for even considering a response.
We're on a site five steps removed from a LiveJournal called squid314, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted this back in April 2014. Scott had been doing SSC for about 14 months, the events that would result in GamerGate were still playing out, and I don't think /r/slatestarcodex was even around then (June 2015?).
I'd posit something like "the openness of the system can only be in proportion to the quality of the general population". As the population gets worse, more gatekeeping is required. Unified logins, generic codebases, and modern web design are on average bad signs; single-site authentication, custom codebases, and archaic design are on average good signs. A lot of commercial web design is to make it easy and attractive for anyone to participate, and in a way, I think we want the opposite. We want people who value the content enough to step outside the path of least resistance.
But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.
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